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Curated by Julie Lazar
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Inheritance offers a mixed palette of programs imbued with bitter sweetness,
humor, frustration and sadness, even tragedy. As the
stories unfold, we observe familiar connecting threads, obstructing
knots, or irregularities between the characters that indicate how
personal choices or acts impact the larger socio-political circumstances
of the world we share.
The three parts of Melinda Morey's Peep Show (A Trilogy) are
interspersed between other works in this program. With spare means
and in a light-hearted manner, Morey references the biblical
figures of Adam and Eve through the discovery of a Pacific island
and its native people; the mystery of their artisanal history;
and the dispersal of its population and culture. Journeying through
space and time on a ship across oceans is a familiar metaphor but
in Trevor Fife's poetic Meridian Days the artist's
travels with his grandmother are not about conquest, colonization
or adventure. They are a subtle meditation on leaving a location
behind only to discover one's place in it, reconnecting with
family history only to distinguish one's self from
it.
Through the recollections of an unusual family who call an antiquated
tower their home, Quirine Racké and Helena Muskens paint
a concise portrait in The Tower of how class, lust, domination,
incestuous instincts, infecundity, selfishness, insecurity, vanity
and self-deception infect and pollute its members. With the precision
of a heart surgeon, Ruth Pringle gives a dead-pan, dead-on "karaoke
performance" of a recorded phone message left by her mother
in Long Distant, that encapsulates a classic mother/daughter
drama of denial followed by recognition. In polar opposition to The
Tower, Cynthia Greig and Richard Smith have produced
an empathetic picture of familial love and affection in, Black
Box: This Is Not My Father. Using as their script
black-box recordings of a pilot's last communications before his
small plane crashed, and through slowing
down and repeating seconds of a "home movie" filmed
before his death, we see the re-presentation of a man who was well
loved and is alive in memory only. Taking her title from a Toni
Morrison essay, Natalia Almada in All Water Has a Perfect Memory records
the voices of her multicultural family as they describe the affects
upon their lives of the drowning accident of the artist's
two-year old sister, Ana Lynn. In this time of poverty and war,
Almada's mother's closing words reverberate with haunting
poignancy, "Since the beginning of time, a mother's
wale of agony of losing one of her children – of losing a child
– has probably always sounded the same, the same as mine—always."
Peep Show (A Trilogy), 2003, by Melinda
Morey (6:00)
Part 1. In the Beginning, (1:00)
Meridian Days, 2003, by
Trevor Fife (12:00)
Peep Show Part 2. The Dream, by
Melinda Morey (2:30)
The Tower, 2001, by Quirine
Racké & Helena Muskens (13:34)
Long Distant, 2003, by
Ruth Pringle (1:00)
Black Box: This Is Not My Father, 2004,
by Cynthia Greig & Richard Smith (4:00)
Peep Show Part 3. Easter Island, by
Melinda Morey (2:30)
All Water Has a Perfect Memory, 2001,
by Natalia Almada (19:00)
(Running time: 54:34) |
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